Mary
Winfrey Trautmann
was born in Indianapolis in 1920. Her father was the theologian
Frederick Kershner, who wrote many books including PIONEERS OF
CHRISTIAN THOUGHT, a great book I read a few years ago. She began
writing poetry in the ’30s and helped her father by reading to him,
since he lost his eyesight in late middle age. She got married, moved
to Whittier, California, and had three daughters. She lived in the same
house from about 1955 until earlier this year. Mary was active in the
women’s movement in the ’70s. She lost a teenage daughter to leukemia
and wrote a memoir about it, called THE ABSENCE OF THE DEAD IS THEIR
WAY OF APPEARING. In 1979 she lost her husband in a plane crash in
Chicago. Another daughter is mentally ill and has been
institutionalized for over thirty years. In the early 1980s Mary helped
found a publishing house called Cleis Press, which just two years ago
came out with her book of selected poems, called SWIMMING INTO CLOUDS.
Her third daughter Julie Trautmann lives in Seattle and is a speech
therapist in a hospital.
Over the past twenty years, ever since I first arrived in Los Angeles, no one has been a better friend to me than Mary. She was wise, funny, supportive, a good listener–she was a patient, dear friend. I had been writing mediocre short stories until I first met her in 1995 at a writer’s group in Pasadena. She was one of the first people who inspired me to start writing poems seriously at the ripe age of thirty-five (I had dabbled a bit as a teenager and in my early twenties). She was always so funny and smart and kind-hearted and giving. She’d experienced so much loss in her life but she didn’t dwell on it, she bore it lightly. Though very talented, she was never really comfortable promoting herself and hunting for a long list of publication credits and renown. I admired her for this. I admired her for her strength and modesty.
I learned so much from Mary: how to craft a free-verse poem; how to edit my own prose, watching out for awkwardness and unnecessary repetitions; how to keep prose elegant and strong. In the realm of living, I learned from her about strength in the face of adversity. She was not plagued by status anxiety. It so happened that the author Kurt Vonnegut went to her school at the same time she did, was in a class below hers at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis. I asked her if his world renown etc. ever got her down, and she answered, “It would, if I let it.” I’ll never forget that. (I myself went to high school with a fellow now sort of world renowned, and later went to college with a world-mythical figure now living in Washington DC in a big white house–and so I try to keep her attitude.)
Where is Mary now? I know she is with her daughter Carol and her husband Paul, and with her parents and her beloved brother Fred and sister Bea . . . How do I know? Can anyone know something like this? Probably not. From the last pages of Thomas Mann’s BUDDENBROOKS, here’s some of the dialogue. The decline and fall of a great North German dynasty is now complete. Some ladies, left behind, remember all who have passed on:
“Hanno, little Hanno,” went on Frau Permaneder, the tears flowing down over her soft faded cheeks. “Tom, Father, Grandfather, and all the rest! Where are they? We shall see them no more. Oh, it is so sad, so hard!”
“There will be a reunion,” said Friederike Buddenbrook. She folded her hands in her lap, cast down her eyes, and put her nose in the air.
“Yes–they say so.–Oh, there are times, Friedericke, when that is no consolation, God forgive me! When one begins to doubt–doubt justice and goodness–and everything. Life crushes so much in us, it destroys so many of our beliefs–A reunion–if that were so–”
But now Sesemi Weichbrodt stood up, as tall as ever she could. She stood on tip-toe, rapped on the table; the cap shook on her old head.
“It is so!” she said, with her whole strength; and looked at them all with a challenge in her eyes.
She stood there, a victor in the good fight which all her life she had waged against the assaults of Reason: humpbacked, tiny, quivering with the strength of her convictions, a little prophetess, admonishing and inspired.
Here is a poem from Mary’s early, formal phase:
Over the past twenty years, ever since I first arrived in Los Angeles, no one has been a better friend to me than Mary. She was wise, funny, supportive, a good listener–she was a patient, dear friend. I had been writing mediocre short stories until I first met her in 1995 at a writer’s group in Pasadena. She was one of the first people who inspired me to start writing poems seriously at the ripe age of thirty-five (I had dabbled a bit as a teenager and in my early twenties). She was always so funny and smart and kind-hearted and giving. She’d experienced so much loss in her life but she didn’t dwell on it, she bore it lightly. Though very talented, she was never really comfortable promoting herself and hunting for a long list of publication credits and renown. I admired her for this. I admired her for her strength and modesty.
I learned so much from Mary: how to craft a free-verse poem; how to edit my own prose, watching out for awkwardness and unnecessary repetitions; how to keep prose elegant and strong. In the realm of living, I learned from her about strength in the face of adversity. She was not plagued by status anxiety. It so happened that the author Kurt Vonnegut went to her school at the same time she did, was in a class below hers at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis. I asked her if his world renown etc. ever got her down, and she answered, “It would, if I let it.” I’ll never forget that. (I myself went to high school with a fellow now sort of world renowned, and later went to college with a world-mythical figure now living in Washington DC in a big white house–and so I try to keep her attitude.)
Where is Mary now? I know she is with her daughter Carol and her husband Paul, and with her parents and her beloved brother Fred and sister Bea . . . How do I know? Can anyone know something like this? Probably not. From the last pages of Thomas Mann’s BUDDENBROOKS, here’s some of the dialogue. The decline and fall of a great North German dynasty is now complete. Some ladies, left behind, remember all who have passed on:
“Hanno, little Hanno,” went on Frau Permaneder, the tears flowing down over her soft faded cheeks. “Tom, Father, Grandfather, and all the rest! Where are they? We shall see them no more. Oh, it is so sad, so hard!”
“There will be a reunion,” said Friederike Buddenbrook. She folded her hands in her lap, cast down her eyes, and put her nose in the air.
“Yes–they say so.–Oh, there are times, Friedericke, when that is no consolation, God forgive me! When one begins to doubt–doubt justice and goodness–and everything. Life crushes so much in us, it destroys so many of our beliefs–A reunion–if that were so–”
But now Sesemi Weichbrodt stood up, as tall as ever she could. She stood on tip-toe, rapped on the table; the cap shook on her old head.
“It is so!” she said, with her whole strength; and looked at them all with a challenge in her eyes.
She stood there, a victor in the good fight which all her life she had waged against the assaults of Reason: humpbacked, tiny, quivering with the strength of her convictions, a little prophetess, admonishing and inspired.
Here is a poem from Mary’s early, formal phase:
To
One Now Blind
What you have lost is not so great a losing
As many think, or say in smothered phrase:
The green and yellow-throated hills, refusing
Winter’s black stare; the violence of day’s
Familiar whiteness; count of birds combining
Their narrow wings in patterns on the wall;
The curving cone; the languor of declining
Wet birches; rainbows; fire—are all, are all
Which, by this subtle cheating, have been hid.
How shall you lack the pageantry of these?
Color and shape and thought still pyramid
From undiscovered sources; still they please
And, one world gone, the galaxies arise
To spires of light behind your darkened eyes.
And here is a later poem:
What you have lost is not so great a losing
As many think, or say in smothered phrase:
The green and yellow-throated hills, refusing
Winter’s black stare; the violence of day’s
Familiar whiteness; count of birds combining
Their narrow wings in patterns on the wall;
The curving cone; the languor of declining
Wet birches; rainbows; fire—are all, are all
Which, by this subtle cheating, have been hid.
How shall you lack the pageantry of these?
Color and shape and thought still pyramid
From undiscovered sources; still they please
And, one world gone, the galaxies arise
To spires of light behind your darkened eyes.
And here is a later poem:
shadow
river
once
the river was young
as we were
graced with small summer islands
that entice lead us toward the shallows’
lucent brimming pools
each island different though every
windward shore churns with rapids
wild shudders and foam
a ragged din
that swings fear up the throat drives us
headlong past the tumult
to stagnant shoals
soft as fresh ferns
to long hours that grow feet sunk in mud
fingers
straining after driftwood
shells crawdads whatever
the river sends
show-offs we put together dams and pyramids
skip rocks until the river’s skin
is stamped with silver rings
or wade beguiled
among the lazy fish
torn bits of honeysuckle buds
we claim it all – islands the brindled crescent beaches
the mud and gnats –
the river too is ours
until
one golden buoyant August afternoon
traps
an unknown child on the windward islands
face down in the reeds
fishlike body striped
bluegreen from algae
the tawny hair a net for water spiders
some mistake we think some sort
of knife change in the weather
bringing him here
without heat or breath
a child like us
but not like us
tears
singeing our cheeks
we cut him loose
and let the rapids fling him near the town
then
run go
give up forever
the sunlit pools the dams
the honeysuckle islands
abandon summer
to the waves
of this hypocrite river
we never mastered or owned or understood
once
the river was young
as we were
graced with small summer islands
that entice lead us toward the shallows’
lucent brimming pools
each island different though every
windward shore churns with rapids
wild shudders and foam
a ragged din
that swings fear up the throat drives us
headlong past the tumult
to stagnant shoals
soft as fresh ferns
to long hours that grow feet sunk in mud
fingers
straining after driftwood
shells crawdads whatever
the river sends
show-offs we put together dams and pyramids
skip rocks until the river’s skin
is stamped with silver rings
or wade beguiled
among the lazy fish
torn bits of honeysuckle buds
we claim it all – islands the brindled crescent beaches
the mud and gnats –
the river too is ours
until
one golden buoyant August afternoon
traps
an unknown child on the windward islands
face down in the reeds
fishlike body striped
bluegreen from algae
the tawny hair a net for water spiders
some mistake we think some sort
of knife change in the weather
bringing him here
without heat or breath
a child like us
but not like us
tears
singeing our cheeks
we cut him loose
and let the rapids fling him near the town
then
run go
give up forever
the sunlit pools the dams
the honeysuckle islands
abandon summer
to the waves
of this hypocrite river
we never mastered or owned or understood
© 2015
Mary Trautmann
Mary Trautmann was a Feature at the November 2015 Second Sunday Poetry Series
Mary Trautmann was a Feature at the November 2015 Second Sunday Poetry Series